Answering that anon made me remember how much insane variety there is in classic Who companions. Like, I’m not knocking new Who for its desire to ground the show through the companions. It’s probably necessary for making the show nowadays. But let’s take a second to appreciate how few fucks the classic Who producers gave. There was…

a genius astrophysicist from the future with perfect memory

a warrior from a primitive society that developed on another planet after the Doctor fucked up real bad one time

a stuck up time lady

a boy genius mathmetician from another reality

an alien aristocrat whose dad’s body was stolen by the Master in her first story and he. just. kept it?

an exiled political prisoner from another world pretending to be a school boy and who’s being manipulated by the avatar of all evil

a shape-shifting robot that the Master found on another planet that the Doctor reprograms and then everyone just forgets about until the Master shows up again (oh and the Master is still running around in that one girl’s dad’s body by the way)

an American

a perfectly ordinary teen who just happened to swept up in time storm and transported to another planet in the far future and starts waiting tables there all as part of the plan of yet another cosmic evil in its ongoing chess match with the Doctor

It’s one of the most celebrated Doctor Who adventures and yet no complete film recordings of The Power of the Daleks are known to have survived. The master negatives were destroyed in an archive purge in 1974.

Announced today, BBC AMERICA and BBC Worldwide have commissioned a brand new animation based on the program’s original audio recordings, surviving photographs and film clips that will be released 50 years after its only UK broadcast on BBC One. Doctor Who: The Power of the Daleks premieres Saturday, November 12 on BBC AMERICA and will be available the following day to stream on the BBC AMERICA App and BBCAmerica.com.

The six-part adventure features the regeneration, or as it was then called ‘renewal’, of first Doctor, William Hartnell into second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, as the Time Lord and his companions Polly (Anneke Wills) and Ben (Michael Craze) do battle with the Daleks on the planet Vulcan.

Doctor Who: The Power of the Daleks is produced and directed by Charles Norton, with character designs from acclaimed comic book artists Martin Geraghty and Adrian Salmon. Sarah Barnett, President of BBC AMERICA, commented, “50 years after its inception, Doctor Who continues to be a global phenomenon that perpetually reanimates itself – literally, right now. “The Power of the Daleks” is the latest uniquely creative storytelling to spring from the extraordinary mythology of the Doctor Who world – there are only a handful of global franchises that have the depth to evolve in this kind of way. We are so proud to present this work to our BBCA Doctor Who fans, who we think will go crazy for this reverent yet shockingly reinvented “mash up”.”

Charles says, “The Power of the Daleks animation is the most ambitious Doctor Who archive restoration ever attempted and we’re all very honored to be a part of such an exciting project. Intelligent, suspenseful and magnificently staged, The Power of the Daleks is one of the great lost classics of 1960s television and a superb example of the black and white era at its finest.” [x]